by Abigail Roux
Ty held up the lid, gave it a sniff and a grimace, then set it down on the table.
Zane rolled his eyes and grabbed up his spoon. “Thanks.”
Ty pointed his fork at Zane as he chewed. “Teamwork.”
Zane winked and started back on his picante sauce and eggs.
“The other boys been in yet?” Ty asked through a mouthful of breakfast.
“They probably went back to sleep,” Zane muttered. “Assholes.”
“Love you too, Garrett,” Nick said as he entered the kitchen, the others trailing in after him. He flopped a legal pad on the kitchen table between Ty and Zane. “Those are your times. Don’t miss your flight.”
Ty picked the pad up and scowled at it. “You boys did a lot of planning after I left you last night, Gunny.”
Nick shrugged, a smirk on his lips. “That’s what the gunny does.”
“We get in an hour before you do so we don’t have all the balls in one basket,” Owen told them as he stole a spoonful of Ty’s eggs.
“Balls?” Zane asked.
Owen held up Ty’s spoon. “Eggs.”
The others were moving through the kitchen, loading up on what appeared to be a mobile breakfast. Their bags were sitting in the foyer. They were preparing to leave.
Owen continued to speak as he chewed. “We’ll meet at Cross’s safe house. Anything goes tits up, it’s every man for himself.”
Zane nodded, committing the information on the legal pad to memory.
Ty stood, giving each man a hug. Even Liam received one, and he looked both surprised and suspicious when Ty let him go. Zane had to take a bite of toast to hide his smile. Ty held Nick tightly, saying something in his ear. He patted Nick’s cheek, smiling as Nick nodded. “I’ll see you on the other side, brother.”
Nick held up his hand, and Ty grasped it. “Not if I see you first,” Nick murmured, and then Sidewinder melted out of the kitchen, leaving a stillness behind that enveloped those remaining.
Zane gave his mother and Mara both a reassuring smile. Beverly stood suddenly, hurrying across the large kitchen toward Zane. Her eyes glistened as she reached both hands out to him, and Zane stood in shock to take her in his arms.
She clung to him, frail and trembling. “You come back from this, Zane,” she hissed against his chest. “Then we’ll tend to that wedding you boys promised us.”
“I’m not freaking out. You’re freaking out. Shut up.” Liam was, though, and they all knew it.
Nick rolled his eyes and banged his head against the back of the freezer.
He would have thought that waking up on a horse ranch in Texas and getting stuck in a restaurant freezer in Miami by late afternoon would be a long story, but it turned out that it was very short.
The NIA had been waiting for Liam when they’d landed in Miami. Apparently, Preston’s CIA-created ID hadn’t been quite as foolproof as they’d expected.
They’d been bagged, tagged, and transported to this building with hoods over their faces. Nick knew it was a restaurant from the sounds and smells alone.
And good God he hoped the slabs of meat hanging in here with them were beef and pork.
Owen was standing in front of Liam, a hand on his shoulder as he tried to calm the man. They had spent long minutes seeking a way out of the locked freezer by the lights of their useless phones, and now they were all shivering, their teeth chattering.
“There should be a safety latch on the inside,” Kelly grumbled.
“Dude, the NIA just threw us on ice. Literally. They’re going to kill us and leave our body parts scattered around town when they get all that money,” Nick drawled. He and Kelly had perched on one of the shelves to keep off the freezing floor. “I don’t think they’re too worried about safety.”
“I’m from Louisiana, man, I ain’t built for this weather,” Digger told them.
“It’s not weather! It’s a freezer!” Liam shouted.
“Shut up!” Digger shouted back.
“God!” Nick squeezed his eyes closed. “Sack up and rejoin the Regiment, dude! Jesus.”
“How can you be so calm?” Liam demanded. “Do you know how much air we have left now?”
“Probably like twenty minutes,” Nick answered, deadpan. “Maybe ten.”
“Bell, calm down,” Owen said. “Breathe.”
Kelly flicked his flashlight app on and waved it in their direction. They’d been left their phones. They couldn’t get service here anyway. Liam winced away from its glare, and Owen held up a hand to shield his eyes. Kelly’s face was impossible to see, but there was concern in his voice. “Dude, you don’t look so hot.”
“That’s because I’m stuck in a freezer!” Liam shouted. His voice echoed off the walls.
“Do you want someone to put you out of your misery?” Kelly asked, suppressed laughter in his voice.
Nick lounged beside Kelly with his back against one of the shelf supports, massaging the bridge of his nose. “Talk it through, man,” he grunted to Liam.
“No, you dealt with Tyler, and you know I have the same issue, okay? Stop being a bag of dicks!”
“He’s rocking,” Nick said.
“T minus five minutes to meltdown,” Kelly added.
“Shut up,” Liam snarled.
Owen rested a hand on Liam’s back, glaring at Nick and Kelly. “As much as I’m secretly enjoying it and trying to pretend I’m not, you two aren’t actually helping the situation right now.”
“It’s fine,” Nick told him. “Just like we used to do to Ty. He’ll panic for a couple minutes, he’ll hyperventilate, he’ll pass out. It’s easier that way than trying to keep him calm.”
Kelly laughed again.
Liam covered his head with his hands. “You’re both arseholes.”
“Yeah, well so are you,” Nick said. “So it all works out.”
Liam raised his head, glaring through the low light. “I’m getting fucking sick of your shite, O’Flaherty. I swear to God.”
Nick slid off the shelf and straightened. “What are you going to do, Bell? Threaten my boyfriend? Break into my boat? Drug me and take me hostage?” Kelly took his arm to calm him but Nick yanked away. “Force me to try to get my friends killed by making the guilt from the past too much to bear? You going to try all that again? ’Cause I didn’t see it working too well for you the first time, son. Second time’s a charm?”
Liam clambered to his feet, shrugging off Owen’s hand when he tried to stop him.
“What am I doing?” Owen asked, holding his hands away from Liam. “Yeah, just kick his ass.”
Kelly remained where he was, the light wavering in his grip. Nick took a step toward Liam, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.
“You got something you’ve been wanting to say to me?” Liam snarled.
Nick turned a little, rolling his shoulder. “I’m going to do you a favor, bud. One old friend to another.”
“Oh, really? ’Cause your last favor got me shot!”
Nick’s jaw tightened and he nodded, glancing at Kelly before he met Liam’s eyes again. He moved quickly, too fast for Liam to react even though Liam really should have known it was coming. It was a classic O’Flaherty haymaker, and it knocked the lights in the freezer right out for the man.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Digger shouted. “What if we need him?”
Nick stood over Liam, huffing and rubbing at his knuckles. Kelly was behind him, a hand on his elbow. “Goddamn your stupid face,” Nick muttered, cradling his hand.
Owen and Digger were both eyeing Liam like they weren’t sure whether to help him or leave him down there to freeze.
“He’s just like Ty in small spaces, remember? If you make him angry, he forgets to panic,” Nick explained, his voice soft and calm again.
Kelly squinted at him through the glaring light of his phone’s flash.
Nick shrugged. “If I’m wrong, at least I got a lot out of it.”
Kelly knelt at Liam’s hip, taking his pulse and checking
his pupils. “He’s okay,” he told the others, sounding sort of disappointed about it. “Let’s get him off the floor.”
“Put him down with one swing,” Owen finally said, grinning. “Damn I wish we’d recorded that.”
Nick held up his right hand, displaying a fist full of scars and mended fingers and one slightly bloody, gold claddagh ring. “I learned from a champion.”
The freezer fell into tense silence after they laid Liam out on a shelf next to the truffles and bacon. Kelly climbed onto the shelf next to Nick and extinguished the light, throwing everything into pitch-black. It was getting colder. They’d come to Miami prepared for battle and muggy warmth, not below-freezing temperatures. They probably weren’t going to freeze in here, but Nick was sort of wondering how much oxygen they had left.
He also wondered why the NIA hadn’t just taken care of them when they had them, instead of literally putting them in cold storage. It all seemed such a waste. The NIA as an organization had been living off handouts ever since Sidewinder had been one of the elite active Recon teams. They’d had to scavenge spec ops from the military, they’d had to pull military officers for their jobs just like they had with Nick, they’d had to scrape and scrounge for their resources. Those hundreds of millions of dollars of cartel money would go a long way toward making them a true power in the intelligence game again, and not just the toothless old aunt in Uncle Sam’s basement.
But that money wouldn’t last long in this game. So why the desperate hunt for it? Why the willingness to kill decorated American veterans in the pursuit? Nick still didn’t understand. Did some suit with three degrees riding an NIA desk somewhere think Ty and Zane possessed the knowledge to get more money out of the Vega cartel? Did they think the information they’d been seeking would somehow siphon off more? Was that what this boiled down to?
It made sense. It was the only thing that did. Nick supposed, if he was right, that they were a backup plan, there to be used as spare parts to make Ty and Zane talk.
Hell. Those agents would probably be back to fetch them before they had to worry about freezing or suffocating. Then it’d be knives and guns and maybe a little boat ride to Gitmo they had to fear.
He snuggled up to Kelly, trying to keep them both warm. Kelly’s breath was shaky. Nick pressed his forehead to Kelly’s and closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “For all I’ve done. I . . .”
Kelly turned his head, his nose brushing Nick’s cheek in the dark. “You did it out of love, babe. That’s all you’ve ever done.”
Nick was silent, the weight of Kelly’s limitless forgiveness almost as oppressive as the cold. All he had left to him was to hold on as Kelly began to rock.
“Any ideas?” Kelly finally asked everyone.
“Stay calm, stay still. Conserve our air and keep warm.” Nick said.
“All we can do is last until someone lets us out,” Digger added. “Then we take our chances with the guns.”
“We should be able to hear them coming,” Owen said. “There’s enough frozen meat in here to use as weapons. If we stay limber enough, we may be able to rush them.”
“You want us to attack the NIA agents with frozen meat?” Digger asked, his voice trembling and his teeth chattering. He snickered. “Literally hit them over the head with our big meatsacks?”
“Oh my God,” Owen grumbled.
It felt like hours, but Nick’s watch proved it was only thirty minutes before there was a clank outside the freezer door and then a sliver of light. They were as prepared as nearly frozen men could be, armed with anything hard or sharp they could find.
When the door opened, the overhead light popped on. Nick had to close his eyes against the glare, and then he squinted at the two men in the doorway. The blond man had his hands on his hips. The big man had an Irish accent.
“Hey, iceholes,” Julian greeted a little too cheerfully.
Nick dropped the frozen meat hook he’d taken from the ceiling, gaping at the two men.
“You boys turn up in the weirdest places,” Preston said as he stepped aside to usher them out into the blessed warmth.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Nick demanded.
“A very pleasant woman named Agent Clancy called, said you’d been unable to perform when you reached the airport,” Preston explained. “I hear there’s a medication for that problem, sir.”
Nick glared at him for a second, then turned to Julian.
Julian arched an eyebrow. “We tailed your captors from the airport. Place was being guarded by two agents. From what we heard, they’re after Garrett, and Garrett alone. They were holding you until they got to him.”
“What the hell did they think this was, cryogenic suspension?” Owen spat as he rubbed at his arms and tried to shake off the bone-deep chill.
“Where are they now?” Nick asked.
“They weren’t quite as durable as we had thought,” Preston drawled with a frightening grin.
“We really must be moving on; we have to get to the airport before these wankers pick up Grady and Garrett. They’ve got their faces plastered all over the place, legitimate and not quite so. Everyone in Miami with a gun and a pair of handcuffs will be looking for them.”
Nick nodded, gesturing for them to lead the way.
Preston pointed the tip of his sniper rifle toward the freezer. “Forgetting something?”
Nick glanced back inside at Liam, stretched out on the shelf where they’d left him. It took him a long moment to decide whether to go back in and get him or just fucking leave him there to get what he deserved.
The others seemed to mostly disapprove of his decision to retrieve the man.
“He’d ’a been a dickcicle if we’d left him,” Digger told them, chuckling as they dragged Liam’s limp body out of the freezer.
Nick grunted and looked down at Liam as Digger and Owen dragged the man between them.
“You still think we can trust him?” Kelly asked Nick as they stepped out into the sunshine.
Nick closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the sun, warmth seeping into him. “I don’t want to think anymore. It’s about feeling now.”
Kelly was nodding, watching as they loaded Liam’s unconscious body into the back of a big, red Ford Excursion. He sniffed. “What’s your gut say?”
Nick let Kelly’s words sink in. “I think . . . I think I might trust him.”
Kelly grimaced as he turned to Nick. “Me too.”
“You gents coming?” Julian called from the passenger side of the Excursion. Preston was in the driver’s seat, starting it up.
Kelly wrapped a hand around Nick’s waist, helping him limp across the street and climb into the back of the car.
The radio was on in the front, the telltale static of a police band whining away. Preston and Julian both looked grim. “We’re too late,” Julian informed them. “Local PD picked Grady and Garrett up at the airport. They’re transporting them now.”
Nick shrugged, smirking as he met Julian’s eyes. “So let’s go bust them the fuck out of jail.”
“Now you see why I hate Miami?”
Ty was sitting beside Zane in the back of the police cruiser, his hands cuffed behind him just like Zane’s were. Ty shrugged. Or sort of shrugged; it was hard with the cuffs. “I don’t know, I’m kind of digging the whole ‘mix of glitter and sweat in my ass crack’ vibe it’s got going. Locals are a little unfriendly.”
“What do you think?” Zane asked. “Are they really local PD, or are those stripper outfits?”
Ty pursed his lips and shrugged again. “I don’t know, dude, they look a little light on the donut to be real PD.”
The two officers in the front seat were trying valiantly to ignore them, both of them stone-faced, eyes on the road as they navigated toward what Zane could only assume was a nice, neat, bottleneck trap where the NIA could pick them off. Zane hoped Ty had a plan, because he’d followed Ty’s lead when they’d submitted to being arrested instead of fighting their way fr
ee. Ty usually had a plan. Right? Please God say Ty had a plan.
“I can’t believe we managed to get picked up by the two dumbest sentient beings in the universe.”
Ty snorted. “Well, how were we supposed to prepare for this? I mean Jesus Christ, what kind of fucking Barney thinks it’s legit when they’re issued an arrest order for the Agent in Charge of an FBI field office because a rival government agency wanted them to?”
Ty was chuckling as he spoke, and the sound kicked Zane off into a laughing fit as well. God damn, how fucking unlucky could two people be?
“Shut up, both of you,” the passenger snarled over his shoulder.
“Son, I hope you had a heavy lunch,” Ty drawled. “’Cause you ain’t making it home to dinner.”
“Are you threatening an officer of the law back there?”
“No, sir,” Ty said, elongating the syllables until the simple words sounded like yet another insult. “I’m just telling you. The people who put that alert out on us? They’re not exactly wearing patches with the thin blue on them, you feel me?”
“I don’t think he feels you,” Zane offered.
Ty suddenly looked alarmed. “I hope he won’t feel me. My heart belongs to the TSA.”
The cops went back to ignoring them, and Ty and Zane met each other’s eyes. Zane frowned and ducked his head toward Ty’s hands, and Ty winked. He was scratching at his wrist with his fingernails, and to Zane’s horror it looked like he was actually raking off skin in swaths, leaving little curled bits of it on the seat behind him.
Then the scratching revealed something dull and gray beneath, and Zane realized it was a key under some type of synthetic skin.
“You fucking beautiful bastard,” Zane murmured. There was Ty’s plan. Get loose and steal the cop car.
“Can I use the flashy blue lights?” Ty drawled. He got hold of the key between two fingers, grinning widely. Zane was still gazing at Ty’s pleased expression when the impact came, throwing them both sideways, knocking the key out of Ty’s grasp and sending the police cruiser and all its occupants into a sickening spin.